The Truth in Crisis

The worst thing about watching the coronavirus pandemic unfold here in the U.S. is the knowledge that we, as a society, are in the absolute worst position to deal with it as we can be. We've set ourselves up to be completely unprepared to deal with a public health crisis specifically because we don't really believe in public systems to address societal problems. So I've had the feeling this whole time that no matter how bad the disease is on its own, because of who we are, it's going to so much worse. I hate it, I hate how unnecessary it is.

There are a lot of different factors involved here- some of them structural, some specific to leadership- but it ultimately comes down to the fact that we as as a society despise capable government. If there's something that needs doing, it's only worth doing if people can make money off it. If there's no profit in it, then we just pile on unnecessary cost and difficulties until some company somewhere can extract enough money from the public and call themselves successful.

Our healthcare system is a prime example of this. There's really no need at all to make  healthcare an industry with a profit motive. In fact, it makes it exponentially worse by cutting off access to those who need it but can't afford it. The crippling fear people have about going to doctor is a feature, not a bug, because, from a business stand point, it's better to make one big payout after people delay treatment then pay out lots of little piecemeal claims. It also, in the past, made it easier to deny claims when people needed treatment. It was a pretty good scam insurance companies had going- in order to get coverage, you had to divulge your entire medical history to them which they would later use against you to find any pretext to deny your claim so they could keep the money you paid them specifically so you would be covered in times of medical crisis.

Obamacare has made people forget that when it literally wasn't against the law to do so, it was standard practice for our entire insurance industry to leave thousands of people destitute, buried in debt, all for a bigger profit margin. 

Another feature of our fragmented system is that it makes any coherent national response to pandemics and other health crises so much harder than it needs to be. Since there are millions of people who are covered by different insurers, HMO's, and government programs, it makes coordinating national testing efforts a convoluted mess of bureaucratic coordination of who will pay what costs for how long e.g. setting aside funds to cover the testing but not treatment. 

There's also the problem of deciding who will administer the tests. Since we don't have a national health care system, the CDC can send out the tests but those are only administered by private institutions to people who self-select to get the test administered. We should have a massive testing effort like South Korea's where people just drive up to a testing station but we literally don't have the capability of doing so. 

This essentially cripples our ability to accurately judge the spread and scale of the pandemic. The most crucial aspect of any pandemic is the basic knowledge of knowing how many people are infected. It's a hard thing to do in and of itself, but having a healthcare system that people avoid by design makes that problem exponentially harder. 

It's the kind of problem any administration would have difficulty with; it's a nearly insurmountable challenge unless you go Spain's route and nationalize private hospitals- which we should, for the record- that requires a delicate, coordinated, and deftly executed plan of attack. 

Unfortunately, all we have are these yahoos who would drown in a wet paper bag. 

It's impossible to overstate how Donald Trump is the worst person in the world to handle this type of crisis. Disciplined, direct, and most importantly, honest communication is essential in times like these. People need to know what the government is going to do, how they're responding, and how they plan to handle the fallout.

But what we have instead is a man who whiffs the softest of softballs so he can complain again how the media is unfair to him. Trump disbanded the Pandemic Response Unit, refused to send doctors to China to get a head start on preparing or understanding how the virus operated, didn't prepare or stock up on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and denied the World Health Organization tests because he didn't want to scare the stock markets. His only concern this whole time is making sure the stock market and the economy don't crash and ruin his chance at reelection.

That's not to say the rest of the government has been doing any better. Senators using classified info for some good ol' insider trading, Republicans setting up a $500 billion slush fund to be doled out anonymously by Steve Mnuchin to whoever he sees fit, and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer balking at direct cash payments because it costs too much and isn't means tested. Biden flat out went MIA for almost an entire week and came back looking like a sad, confused grandpa who can't remember who he's talking to. The only one who looks like they have a clue as to what they're doing is Bernie, but why talk about him?

Not to say that any of this unexpected, of course. Republicans never waste an opportunity to funnel ever more billions into the hands of the already disgustingly rich. Liberals like Chuck and Nancy are pathologically afraid of handing out free money lest it end up in the hands of the undeserving poor. What did surprise me though, is how quickly the "let's go back to work and cull the herd" crowd popped up.

I figured we had to go into the tail end or very start of the second quarantine week before the "You know what? Maybe we just let people die" crowd reared its head. But nope. Instead we've got people from Trump to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick all talking about how they need to strike a balance between keeping people healthy and the economy going.

There's been a large contingent of people hammering them for this, thankfully, but one thing I keep seeing repeated is the charge that Trump et al. are willing to let 2% of the country die to save the economy for a few more months. This is based on early reporting that the coronavirus has a 2% mortality rate, so people are just running with that.

The thing is, mortality rates aren't inherent- they're the end result of a lot of different factors coming together. For one thing, a lot depends on how big you can make the denominator of total cases. South Korea, for example, has a mortality rate of .65%. A big reason for this is that the government did a huge testing blitz- as a result, they found and recorded thousands upon thousands of mild cases that didn't require hospitalization and were more effectively give treatment to those who needed it. So even though they have had 40 deaths as a result of the virus, taken against the 6,088 cases they've reported, you end up with a whisper of a mortality rate.

Another thing to take into consideration is the capacity of the healthcare system and the ability of that system to dedicate the resources it needs to deliver care. Italy, with its large elderly population, has been hit incredibly hard by the virus and is driving doctors to despondency over rationing care. A vulnerable population mixed with a government who took active steps just a little too late has led to a situation where people are dying by the hundreds every day. Things are looking up, however, in that it seems Italy has passed its peak with fewer new cases reported in the last few days.

We don't have any reason to expect that kind of news anytime soon, especially if Trump gets his way of getting people back out to work and regular public life in the next few weeks. We are no where near our peak, and, even though, as of this writing, there are 54, 808 (edit: in the three days this sat on my computer, it jumped to 100,392) officially reported cases, the paucity of our testing regime means we are missing tens of thousands more. If we go back out like there's nothing wrong in a world where we aren't ramping up production of PPE's, of not buying respirators and ventilators, of no social distancing, no quarantines, then by the middle/end of April we'll have people dying by the thousands, every day. In that world, we'll be praying to work our way down to a 2% mortality rate.

I know it sounds a little hyperbolic, but it breaks down like this. We only have so many hospital beds and hospitals, period. Over half of rural counties have no hospital at all, so where are they supposed to go? To larger, urban areas with already overfilled hospitals? The lack of PPE's means that the doctors, nurses, and EMT's who are going to the front line of this crisis will have no reliable protection against the virus so when they get sick, it lowers the capacity of professionals who are able to direct and administer care to the infected. The lack of respirators and ventilators will compound this problem as there are fewer and fewer mechanical resources for depleted medical staff to dole out to an ever increasing number of patients.

What makes this all the more horrifying is this situation doesn't add any new complications, it just amplifies the built-in flaws of our system to their logical conclusions.

 There are ways to mitigate what's happening and that we can dedicate our time to screaming the government make happen. First, just give everyone money; $2,000 for every adult and $1,000 for every child. Next, cancel/suspend all debt, rent, mortgage payments for everyone, period. Then, increase unemployment insurance so it provides 75%-90% of lost salaries. Increase SNAP benefits by at least 50% for anyone receiving them. Do all of this indefinitely.

There will be cries of "How do you pay for it?" and "But what if rich people get them too?" to which I say, who gives a shit. The U.S. is called a sovereign currency issuer, meaning that since the government has the sole authority to create money and does so on demand, the government doesn't actually have to "get" its money from taxes or other revenue streams. It literally can make money appear out of thin air. I know that idea makes people uncomfortable, so fine, you can tax the 1% a modest percentage after this whole thing is over so the government can "make" the money back.

Next, a federal shelter-in-place order for at least two weeks. All non-essential businesses are shut down, everyone stays home, start a curfew, anyone who breaks it is subject to legal penalty. Use the Defense Production Act to requisition and redirect manufacturing capabilities to increase the supply of PPE's, ventilators, and respirators around the country and supply around the globe. Also, nationalize every private hospital in the country and make treatment free at the point of care.

Release as many prisoners as possible to stop the spread of infection in prisons. Supply housing- in the form of empty hotel rooms or vacant housing- for every homeless person in the country. If any corporation requests a bailout, it must be under the terms that Elizabeth Warren outlined. If it's a company like a cruise line- which, why are we even talking about this?- they must additionally register their businesses so they sail under the U.S. flag to pay all appropriate taxes and comply with the labor laws of the U.S.

Sadly, the large majority of this won't happen. Congress is set to adjourn until at least April 20th after the massive corporate bail-out works its way through the House. It should tell you everything you need to know that, after giving away half a trillion dollars to the rich, our leaders consider their jobs done and are packing up to go home.

 If it should come to pass that Trump orders the country to go back to work in the next two weeks, then we need a general strike to grind everything to halt. Refusing to go to work and possibly triggering an economic collapse is tragically one of the few ways we have of saving millions of lives.

I'm sure a lot of this sounds too radical to do. But consider the alternative. The vision of Trump and the Republicans means you get sent out to work in a time of literal plague to protect the profit of someone else. And what do you get in return? Sick, most likely. At best, you get a mild case of a high fever and terrible cough that puts you out of commission for a few weeks. More likely though, is that your symptoms progress and get worse because you don't have access to treatment. And whatever mild symptoms you start out with balloon into something worse that even if you survive will leave you with chronic lung issues probably for the rest of your life.

While all this is happening to you, your job, your employer who is demanding you put yourself at risk of all this, will abandon you to die without a second thought.

Fuck that. Fuck living on the edge, fuck a system that will literally kill us by the millions to protect its profits for a few more months. It's a barbaric way to live and for anything good to even have chance of happening after all this is done, we have to admit that the way we live now is a failure and we have to do something different. It's literally a matter of survival and if we ignore it, we die. It's just that simple.

Things are going to get bad, no matter what. Our government is incapable/refusing to do everything in its power to stop the spread of the virus and to mitigate the damage its already doing. It basically comes down to how good your governor is, at this point. So please, stay home, stay inside, treat the situation like you're already infected and just aren't showing. We're pretty much all we've got to get through this, so, let's not fuck it up.

Let's Get This Over With

After the Super Tuesday primaries, it is increasingly likely that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. This is somewhat unfortunate because Biden will lose to Trump in spectacular fashion. 

He'll lose by a wider electoral margin than Hillary did and win the popular vote by a slimmer margin. There's going to be a lot of pieces dissecting what went wrong, how it could've happened, and who's to blame eight months from now, but for once in my life I figured I should get something done ahead of time.

The Left is Too Divided

This is going to be the big one. I can already see the think piece headlines, the gloating talking heads on Fox, the condescending on CNN, and the lamenting on MSNBC. So many people are going to lambast Bernie Sanders and his supporters for not backing Biden because he didn't live up to their impossible purity test and I am already rolling my eyes at this. 

What this will fail to understand is that the reason leftists by-and-large rejected Biden is because Biden, along with most mainstream Democratic politicians, aren't on the Left. 

This isn't a No true Scotsman argument, just an honest assessment of where people stand. A crippling aspect of American political culture is the refusal to see politics as a binary, of two opposite sides arrayed against each other in order to find the perfect balance between their viewpoints. Obviously this is just dumb. Politics work on a spectrum, meaning people can be political opponents and still be working within the same ideological framework.

Biden is a fundamentally center-right politician. He doesn't necessarily believe the government should actively discriminate against people, but he's not exactly opposed to it, either. He thinks the government should step in at times of disaster like hurricanes or the financial crisis; but that intervention is a temporary action meant to reestablish the normal workings of business and finance as quickly as possible. 

In his internet infamous interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, Biden said that even if Congress passed a Medicare-for-All bill, he wouldn't automatically sign it. His reasons for doing so were concerns over its budgetary impact and whether it would delay the ability of citizens getting healthcare "now."

These sound reasonable enough, but they're indicitive of where Biden's core concerns lay. He mentions taxes and how terrible a burden it'd be on the middle class, but it ignores the burden of paying potentially thousands in premiums every year and the tens or hundreds of thousands debt on top of it. Does Joe Biden really think that a tax increase that amounts to maybe a few hundred or a thousand dollars spread out over a full year is a greater burden than $100k in medical debt?

Biden also repeats that $35 trillion number so many times it becomes a fucking mantra. Broken down, that's $3.5 trillion a year. Our current total healthcare spending, both government and private, is $3.6 trillion. By 2027, that number is expected to climb to $6 trillion. So what it comes down to is Biden is freaking out about the budget impact of a national policy that cuts costs by nearly 50%. It's also important to remember that that $3.5 trillion covers everything, for everyone, whenever they need it. 

Freaking out about the Medicare-for-All price tag is like being told you could live in a mansion and pay the same rent as your shitty college apartment but saying no because you can't spare $700.

At the heart of it all is that Biden doesn't see the payments and obligations to private insurers and hospitals because they generate profit. The jobs they create inflate both the cost and complexity of our medical system to no benefit, but hey, economic activity right?

In Biden's view, the government is the only possible source of undue obligations or burdens. If private enterprise costs too much then, well, that's the market's problem to fix. The government can't get too involved or provide services directly because then that robs a potential bootstrapper of their profit stream. 

And that's really it. In the left's view, the government not only has the capability but the obligation to provide directly for its citizens. Personal freedom is meaningless if the only outcomes of education to better yourself or using medicine to save your life leaves you in ruinous debt. If the only way to avoid those things is to stay at a job you hate or throw yourself at the mercy of a company willing to pay your tuition once you've "proved" your worth to them, that's just feudalism with extra steps. 

The Youth

Biden's numbers from young voters in the primaries are abysmal. They won't get better, and his weakness here is fatal. 

It's easy enough to figure out why. Bidens only response to every major concern of my generation has been, in so many words, "Fuck you."

On climate change, student loan debt, income inequality, Biden has insisted that sure, they're kinda problems, but everything's basically fine, okay? 

This is so astoundingly tone deaf that I'm honestly impressed by it. Axios had a story that showed Biden's potential Cabinet picks and it's just every Wall Street ghoul you can think of. Biden is legit prepared to hand over the reigns of power to the very people who destroyed the world 13 years ago and walked away scot free and he expects a generation who's grown up in the wreckage of that financial crash to go along with it? Are you kidding me?

Even without all that, Biden has nothing to offer. He condescendingly lectures about how incremental change is the only thing possible, that it's the only way anything gets done. Trump has blown this excuse to bits; he's proven that if you want to change something, all you need to do is do it and the rest will pretty much fall in line. 

Plus, incremental change is completely inadequate to the challenges in front of us. Spending three years to work out an agreement to begin phasing out fossil fuels ten years from the signing date is a resignation to the catastrophic effects of climate change that Biden and his rich benefactors won't have to face. We need someone who recognizes that these are the problems of now that need to be dealt with now and Biden not only has no interest in being that person, he doesn't even believe that person is really necessary. 

Put all this together and you have a candidate who not only doesn't represent the interests of an entire segment of the voting population, he's actively dismissive if not outright hostile to them. I'm already preparing myself for the months of mental work I'll have to do to choke down the revulsion I'll feel voting for Biden. But I know there are hundreds of thousands of people like me who won't. 

It's not worth it to them to fight back that existential despair knowing that voting for Biden means consigning the world to a different flavor of certain doom than Trump. And I can't blame them for that. 

I mean, they saw what happened. When Bernie won New Hampshire and Nevada the DNC, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and MSNBC all rallied behind Biden, who looked on the verge of a breakdown the more the primary went on, to make sure the narrative and momentum of Sanders campaign stopped dead in its tracks. 

And hey, it looks like it's working. But this isn't about a candidate, really. What made Bernie so compelling to so many people is he made them feel like they mattered, that they were important, and, most importantly, they were seen. Recognition is a powerful thing, once given, it creates a level of trust and commitment that's hard to break or transfer, especially when that same level empathy isn't given. 

What the DNC has done with their media blitz against Sanders and his platform is tell all the people who believed in him that they don't matter, that their problems just aren't worth solving because it's too inconvenient and expensive. 

In his essay The Rebel, Albert Camus said that when a man says "No" what he means is "Yes." That yes, he does have value, his concerns are relevant, and yes, he can refuse what is being commanded of him. Biden will make the same mistakes Hillary did in that he will focus exclusively on the evils of Trump's administration while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge or rectify the actions he took that directly created this situation. 

He won't reach out, he won't do the work, he will simply point and say "At least I'm not that dude." He will act as if he is entitled and we will all pay dearly for the fact that he is not. 

The Russians

Ah, yes, our favorite Cold War hit is back from the grave. This trope is going to do so much work over the next weeks and months. It will undoubtedly come up when ashy critique of Biden from the Left about how his previous actions plus current plans don't add up to these problems at hand. At which point, shills everywhere will instantly harp on whoever's making the critique for being a Russian stooge working to divide the Democrats and ensure Trump's reelection. 

Will some of those critiques originate or get boosted by Russian-operated bot accounts looking to fuck with our political system? Of course. Is that relevant? No. 

What should be the bigger concern here is that if you don't want your presidential nominee harassed for their policy record of screwing over working class people and the poor then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't work so hard to elevate a candidate who has a record of screwing over the working class and the poor. You should especially not tell people who headed legitimate concerns that those concerns aren't real, or, even if they are real, that theoretically serve the interests of a foreign bad man, so shut up.

All the Russia hysteria does is leave a vulnerable, problematic candidate with the same vulnerabilities and problems. Since Biden and his surrogates will do nothing to fix his problems except scream "Putin!" at them hoping they'll go away, they won't adapt, won't modify anything and then they'll go down in flames wondering how all this could happen to them again. 

As I see it, those are the big three reasons the media and pundits will trot out after November to make sunset of it all. It's all overcomplicated nonsense to disguise that Joe Biden is a terrible candidate that has next to no chance of winning. What's hilarious though is that if I'm the people running Biden's campaign, I am thanking god for the miracle of the coronavirus. 

The best thing that can happen for Biden is for people to not physically see him or be in his presence. Sure, we all had a giggle when told that factory worker spouting that 2nd amendment NRA nonsense that he was full of shit because honestly, fuck the NRA. But what happens if he pulls that on someone who brings up climate change, or healthcare? What if someone calls him on the effects of his crime bill and he loses it on them? 

That's not to mention the fact that his debate performances have been getting worse as the primaries go on so, yeah, if you need a healthcare system that cannot handle the fallout from a global pandemic as an equalizer, maybe you shouldn't be running for president. 

Hopefully, I'm wrong. The world is a volatile place at the best of times and calling not only the outcome but the response to something eight months away is inherently reckless and more than a little stupid. Still, that the best case scenario of me being wrong is that the collapse of our society into a fascistic autocracy on a planet in ecological crisis makes worrying about being wrong feel silly.